Fuck Alfred Lord Tennyson!

He was the one who said the immortal words:

"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

You know what that tells me about Alfie?

Either he's never been in love.

Or he's only been in love once.

Let me preface this mini-rant by stating that this is not consciously about any particular person (although a therapist after a week's worth of work would determine that it was about a bunch of different people)

I was on the train on the way home and I was thinking about this quote while listening to some Radiohead (probably didn't help) and I came to the conclusion that, while I'm sure it sounded smart at the time, it was a really STUPID concept.

I mean, sure if you've fallen in love once and lost and no matter what the pain was, you can always say you've had the experience of love.

But after the second, third and fourth "lost loves", that outlook goes straight out the fucking window.

The older I get, the more I feel that it's better to have not loved anymore than to have given love another shot to lose me again.

Seriously, after a couple of stabs at it, do you feel any better about it?

Do you feel like you're getting somewhere?

Do I feel like a better person for having loved and lost more than once? Yes and no.

Yes, I know more about what it means to be a human being and I know more about relationships and women and emotions than I ever would have.

But I also know more about pain and loss and irrational thought than your average Star Trek geek attends conferences every year and lives in his mother's basement (well, maybe not irrational thought).

Lucky them. They couldn't holodeck the emotions attached with multiple lost loves.

One and done would have been good enough for me.

There's another saying...

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. (Chinese Proverb)

Fool me three times...then what?

Shit, what about four or five times?

Does that make me mentally challenged, a glutton for punishment or a foolish optimist?

Maybe, it's time for me to take the Radiohead off the old iPod.

*Please note, the emotions expressed in this rant have a shelf life of 12 days. When it expires, I will pretend I never felt this way. Please allow me to be in such denial.